The ability to meet together is an essential need of human beings. People meet for a variety of reasons such as collaboration on a project, collective education, entertainment, relationship renewal, and so forth. Regardless of the reason for the meeting, the scheduling of a meeting involves the consideration of several key considerations. For instance, key meeting parameters may include the desired attendees, the availability of each attendee, whether each attendee is mandatory or optional, the desired duration of the meeting, a desired date range for the meeting, whether there is a suitable meeting place available with suitable equipment, and the like.
Traditionally, the scheduling of meetings was done manually. For meetings with a large number of participants, at least some of which being quite busy, the manual scheduling of meeting may involve hours or even days of administrative time. Fortunately, a variety of electronic calendaring programs have been developed that allow for more computer-facilitated scheduling of meetings.
One model of electronic meeting scheduling involves the selection of attendees for the meeting. Then, free and busy data for each attendee is displayed to the user. The user may then scan through potential meeting times until the user finds a time when all or most of the attendees are available. The user can then generate an electronic meeting request, fill in the desired time for the meeting, and send the electronic meeting request to the desired attendees. If a room and/or equipment is needed for the meeting, the user can navigate through the available rooms to evaluate the availability of the rooms as well. It can take some training to learn how to schedule rooms using conventional electronic calendaring programs.
Even with this electronic help, however, the user still has the task to scan through the raw free and busy data to find a suitable time. This can take significant time. In some electronic calendaring programs, there is a helpful feature that allows for the user to identify the attendees and duration of a meeting, then automatically navigate forward or backwards through time to find the next time that all of the attendees will be available. However, the use of this feature also can take some training or user research. Furthermore, this tool is often too restrictive by limiting times to those in which all attendees are available, even though it may be acceptable if not all of the even required attendees are in attendance. The user wants to find the appropriate balance between finding a soon enough time to meet with maximizing the number of people who can actually attend the meeting; however, current tools focus only on maximizing the number of attendees.